Intro Constant Contact Review Comparison

Constant Contact have been from the marketing game since 1995. Throughout this time they’ve managed to turn into one of the most used email tools in the world. Constant Contact Review Comparison

What Makes them unique is that they have added features over the decades that not one like surveys, an event management tool, and social campaigns. These add to the list of email options as well as automations and newsletters.

On top of these choices, they also boast a Market with over 400 integrations which cater for even the most niche of products and programs. Yet despite these flashy numbers and features, curiosity about Constant Contact seems to be according to Google Trends. Reason for us to take a better look at Constant Contact’s ins &amp; outs and check if it’s still relevant in the 21st century.

If you are choosing an email Marketing tool for the business, you can do a lot worse than Constant Contact (which starts at $20 a month). If you would like to try out some of the features without committing, then a trial is offered by the company. This review looks specifically. Were it not for some hiccups that were unexplained, Constant Contact could have been an easy choice for our initial choice.

How does Constant Contact stack up against the Competition in its marketing database for companies with 2,500 connections? It carries a $45-per-month price tag that is high. Many advertising tools have a cap on how many messages you can send in a month but Constant Contact does not.

Since our last look, Constant Contact has Email autoresponders beyond these triggered by sign-ups, such as anniversaries and birthdays. You can also send an email series to a set such as a day-by-day guide to getting started with follow-ups or your service to a occasion. This works by matching them up using autoresponders and copying your contacts into various folders. The image library allows 2 GB of storage. Users may also access paid and free stock photographs through Constant Contact. You can interact with support via Twitter. Constant Contact Review Comparison

Customer Support

Constant Contact is Simple to Use and has plenty Of help options, beginning with the information icons located alongside choices and disciplines describing what they are Knowledge Base articles, and trainers accessible. Constant Contact has an Activity page that lists the status of various tasks, such as contacts that are uploaded, so that you understand what’s going on in the background.

Phone support Isn’t 24/7 but the hours are Still pretty generous, moving from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. during the week, also 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. Chat can be obtained, along with the brokers will also call you to make sure you have.

Pricing and Features

Constant Contact offers a number of plans Depending on the size of your subscriber base. The least expensive plan is $20 a month for up to 500 subscribers and $45 for up to 2,500. A mid-tier plan prices $195 for 10,000 subscribers and $335 for 50,000. Price-wise, it is not too different from Campaigner. You can sign up for additional add-on providers, for example EventSpot ($20 per month for a single occasion; $25 for up to five events) for event registrations, and research ($10 per month) to conduct polls (all of which can be included at no additional charge on the Email Plus program ). The fundamental account comes with a Library to keep pictures used in the email campaigns. MyLibrary Plus ($5 per month) expands your storage to 1 GB. Newsletter Archive ($5 a month) generates a widget that can be added to your site on which you can display links to up to 100 mails. If you would like your customers to have the ability to see your messages, this is a.

The free trial gives you access to all These attributes for 60 days but you can send up to 100 emails. The trial is a superb way to get accustomed to the platform to get a number of messages. When you are sure about the platform, update to the paid version and get started blasting away. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is uncommon in this area.

Campaigns

When you’re ready to make a newsletter, you May use the template to begin. The editing application lets you tweak text, pictures, and colors. There is also a networking library where you can save your own resources, such as company logos and other graphics. Constant Contact Review Comparison

As Soon as You’re Happy with your own newsletter, You can send it right away or schedule it for later (in 5-minute periods, such as 3:05 a.m., 3:10 a.m., and so on). We could not locate a recurring program to send messages on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis the manner Campaigner doesto send messages based on the local time in the receiver’s place, as GetResponse can.

The Business recently announced a new Feature named Action Blocks, which allow marketers to add polls or RSVP blocks to regular emails. This enables recipients to respond to messages with one click without having to leave the email inbox and also go to a web page.

Tracking Efforts

You can monitor, As Soon as You’ve sent a newsletter using the Reports tab, its success. The dash displays the fundamentals, such as unsubscribe requests, and opens, clickthroughs, bounces. A useful bar chart shows open prices and a graph compares performance over multiple campaigns. Users may also select up to five mails to compare high-level results side by side. The report has a handy Refresh button so that you may see real-time outcomes. It’s not like MailChimp in which you have to manually load the pages. When we opened emails and clicked on the links, they were registered almost instantly.

The Resource Center offers links to Information about typical clickthrough rates by industry. You can also look at comparative metrics to find out if your degree of involvement with your customers is improving or declining over the past 3 months. The mobile app is useful if you want to observe the effort performance from your mobile device.

Lists

There Are Lots of ways Constant Contact: copy and paste, manually type addresses into a form, upload a file (CSV, XLS, XLSX, or TXT), import from Gmail, or pull from Outlook and other (CRM) tools.

When we used the form Speech, we repeatedly received an error message but it didn’t state what had gone wrong. We were prompted to hit the last button to go back and fix the problem but we could not because the page had died from our browser (Firefox) cache. After a couple of tries, the whole webpage crashed. This is an unusual experience, to say the least. Constant Contact has ensured us its infrastructure has greatly improved since our initial test and this is not likely to happen again.

The file upload import, and CRM Migration options, on the other hand, were easy to use and stable. We think most people would wind up using these choices. We tracked the upload improvement under”Contacts: Activity” and was notified when the import was finish. Like Campaigner, Constant Contact allows Mailinator and disposable speeches. It’s too bad many services do not follow the example of GetResponse$15.00 in GetResponse, which filters out known disposable domains. Constant Contact instead flags contacts that are likely so that the user can choose whether to eliminate or store them to be other or transactional similar email addresses.

Segments are based on that list you. Select when saving the contacts but it’s also really easy to go back and change the list. In the Contact Managerwe clicked on the speeches we wanted to add to another listing. A new feature enables users to choose a list for contacts to be added to if they click on on a link in an email, the company said. This attribute is available in most packages. Furthermore, it can be paired with an autoresponder so that, when a link clicks, a email is delivered to them automatically. Constant Contact lets you assign tags to contacts, which can be helpful if you need to track things such as how they signed up, if they’re loyalty associates, or whatever else you might want to monitor. Constant Contact Review Comparison

Our only quibble with the Contact Manager is That it is a hassle to edit the consumer records. When we pasted our listing and cut, we simply dropped in addresses. We did not have other areas, such as name or address. Update the subjects and we needed to load each individual record to bring this. This wasn’t that straightforward because the pages were slow to load in our testing. Since we could see the entire list in Contact Manager, then it might have been nice to be able to just click on the lost area, enter, and just keep going straight down the page. Lesson learned: Be certain to have all of the applicable fields before uploading the titles, populated from the listing.

Constant Contact also lets you produce forms That clients can use to register for emails and newsletters. These forms can be hosted either on your site or on Constant Contact’s servers. The users can be segmented by you based on whether they used alternative methods or the form, which can be helpful. The business also recently announced a brand new signup form editor that’s intended to permit users to produce inline forms that may be embedded on a website as well as pop-up forms which could be customized to show after a set amount of time or when a visitor attempts to leave the website, the company said.

Constant Contact demands you to verify that You have consent from your record –no purchased lists allowed! As there’s absolutely no way to confirm you’ve got consent from each individual receiving messages sent to this 37, you can not use group addresses such as sales @ or advertising @ addresses or distribution lists. You might create autoresponders, listed under the button, to send automatically when a user is added to some list. We used the templates to construct a particular Welcome newsletter .

Drawbacks

Constant Contact appears like a Stage but its arbitrary error messages were disconcerting. This apart, the instrument is solid, and for businesses new to email marketing, Constant Contact is a fantastic way to get started. We wish it offered flexibility in the scheduling of autoresponders of production and campaigns particularly. Constant Contact Review Comparison

If you do not want these features, Then Constant Contact is a superb option. Should you want a little bit more flexibility in your marketing strategy, then check out email advertising Editors’ Choices Campaigner and MailChimp.

Automation

Because Constant Contact only offers seven Sorts of advertising automation works, the firm does not want to refer to itself as a advertising and marketing automation suite. Rather, Constant Contact likes to inform prospects that it is a cross between email advertising and advertising automation or exactly what it requires”email automation”

That is because, unlike other tools, for example Editors’ Choice advertising automation systems Pardot and HubSpot, Constant Contact does not does not provide branching logic. Instead, it focuses on two factors to begin automation campaigns. By way of example, an automation workflow can be started by you whenever someone joins a listing or accomplishes a milestone, like a birthday or anniversary for a customer. But you can not alter automationsbased on whether someone opened an email, forwarded an email, or clicked on a link.

Automation platforms slightly more smart and, well, automatic, than email tools, make life more personalized and more easy for entrepreneurs for customers. Additionally, Constant Contact does not provide A/B testing (they do offer subject line A/B testing), no search marketing inclusion, and the limited workflows it is possible to create do not offer you drag-and-drop builders, that are pretty much standard nowadays. If you require automation for interactions with customers Constant Contact is a reliable automation program. However, if you would like flexible workflows and advanced sequencing that adapt to your customers’ specific actions Constant Contact isn’t strong enough to compete in the marketing automation space.

Conclusion

As Constant Contact themselves reiterate through their website, they are a tool for small companies. And, as it’s worth assessing them on those terms. They have enough of the fundamentals covered to satisfy businesses, as stated above, and if it were as simple as that we’d recommend them more highly. Constant Contact Review Comparison

Nowadays, the issue, is that there are Lots of email Tools offering even greater than Constant Contact, and also for a lot less cash. This includes not only attributes, but also user experience. In reality, for the volume you pay with Constant Contact, you could end up using more powerful tools like GetResponse and ActiveCampaign.

They do pick things up Due to their decent deliverability prices, integrations (particularly social websites integrations), and for enabling different access levels for separate users. And with recent improvements to coverage and marketing automation, it will seem as though they’re making an attempt. But their lack of features, such as marketing automation, makes it difficult to recommend over others at their price point. Constant Contact Review Comparison